Big Oil's Illogical Stance

News of the latest record profits by Exxon are stunning. They broke their previous record, which was also an all time record of the biggest profit of any company in the world. They made $1,300 a second in profit. We looked up the per capita & per employee profits, which dwarf the "economic incentive" tax refund we are about to get this year. What corporate policies lead to such extreme profits? Is there a direct correlation with the secret energy task force put together by Vice President Dick Cheney in the early days of the Bush administration and the resulting deregulation surge of uncontrolled lopsided capitalism?

I listen to the talking points of the Republican Party & Far Right, courtesy their effective brainwashing of the gullible masses. I have plenty of friends, acquaintances, and associates who dutifully repeat these pearls of wisdom sent down by their corporate overlords. One of my favorites is "The LIBERALS (use your own degree of degradation and scorn here) won't let us drill for oil of the coast". Never mind disastrous oil spills and the fact that oil won't last forever, and the fact that we are polluting our planet to death - all of our problems would be solved instantly by more drilling. This would already be happening except for the fact that crazy liberals, who have nothing better to do but plot the destruction of America, have insidiously inserted OVERREGULATION into the mix in order to thwart those civic minded saints at the oil companies, who just want to be allowed to help us all, out of the goodness of their hearts.

This ignores the fact that Republicans were in charge of both houses of congress and the presidency during the time when gas was soaring over $3 a gallon and this phony argument was most often heard. It also ignores that often restrictions to oil drilling are put on the ballot and supported by popular votes. I seem to remember that they found "the biggest oil reserve ever" under the seabed off of Louisiana. This is the one place where they can and do drill without any restrictions, so I've never understood the logic behind this complaint.

Then Katrina hit, and gasoline prices surged again, and we were told that the problem was that we don't have enough refining capability. Yet, curiously, you don't hear the Oil Industry lobbying to make more refineries. If you ask about this, the response is that there is too much regulation and it's almost impossible to make more refineries. The complaint of overregulation doesn't stop the industry from lobbying to drill for more oil, only to refine it. And why is this? This is because a bottleneck of refining capability is what drives the price up.

Wake up, America. We were sold out on this one.

Ill Wind

Book Review WITH SPOILERS

I was loaned Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason by my brother, who recommended it. I'd read Anderson before, particularly his collaborations with Brian Herbert in the extended Dune series. A quick search shows that he was also the author of "The League of Extroidinary Gentlemen" which was made into a movie. He also wrote a lot of Star Wars books.

This book has a great premise, but it falls flat. There was something both unbelievable and incredibly irritating about the characters. I kept waiting for something very dramatic or very heroic to happen, and it didn't. Some characters had fatal flaws, but kept mucking around. Other characters were full of honor and purpose, but couldn't get their act together. While you could argue that this is a fair description of real life, the result here is a story you can't believe.

The premise is an interesting. I remember hearing about oil eating bacteria years ago as a solution to oil spills years ago. The intersting premise here is what if it gets out of control. They manage to make this very extreme, unbelievable, and not very interesting. Connoisseurs of the end of the world genre know that society breaks down pretty fast. They just sort of gloss over this effect. In all, I didn't care if the noble scientists trying to save the world succeeded, and I didn't believe either their triumphs or setbacks. Too bad. It's worth exploring in better detail later.

Ironically, there was an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay the week I started reading this book, and another in the Black Sea the next week, as well as a minor spill off of Israel, if I remember that last one properly. So it was a timely read, but not at all satisfying.

My Energy Policy

Sometimes I dream about what I would do as President to try to make things right. I've heard many of the arguments about how the President really doesn't have that much power and can't enact changes unilaterally. I would have agreed with this before, but the recent administration shows that the President has more than enough power to screw things up royally, so I'm proceeding under the assumption that he also has the power to start pointing the country in the right direction.

One thing that I dream about is fixing the energy situation.

Powerful forces are aligned to keep things the way they are now. I believe Exxon Mobile made more profits last year than any company in history, ever (even adjusted for inflation). This in a time where we are paying almost 3 times more for gasoline than at the beginning of the administration. During recent disruptions in production, notably when the refineries and offshore rigs in the Gulf were disrupted during Katrina, but also when we have had refinery problems (such as the flooding of the refinery in Coffeyville Kansas) we have seen fuel prices spike up due to these supply emergencies. Prices never go down to pre-mini-crisis levels, and we are told that we simply don't have the refinery capacity. Yet, with all the oil company record profits, not a single move is being made to increase refinery capacity. Administration apologists and industry advocates tell us that the problem is that we don't drill enough in the Gulf or in Anwar in Alaska, but we don't even have enough capacity to refine the oil that we do get. Who has any doubts or reservations about this administration, with it's tight relationship with the oil companies that environmental regulations won't be eased and permitting processes won't be simplified if the oil industry really wanted to build new refineries?

I'm all for making money and supplying a hungry nation with its needs, but why isn't anybody associated with public policy doing this in a sustainable or logical way? Does anyone think we'll be able to keep using oil without regard to where we get it, how long it will last, or what it is doing to our environment?

I think public policy, and by that I mean Government Policy, has to force the issue. True leaders would be looking ahead and positioning our energy use and production for the future. True leaders would start solving problems early, before they become crises instead of waiting until turmoil and sacrifice are required to get us out of the corner we've painted ourselves into.

True leaders would recognize that those that are supplying us with energy now are in the best position to supply us with the new forms of energy in the future, and therefore are best positioned to benefit from a changing energy profile. By partnering with energy companies while at the same time forcing them to adapt and innovate, we could insure a smooth transition into our energy future. I'm talking about gas stations selling hydrogen, ethanol, and biodiesel. I'm talking about power companies eventually generating with fusion plants, but also helping spread solar and wind energy, connecting individuals to the grid and profiting from financing the capital costs of individuals generating and adding to the grid.

I grew up during the height of the space race, during our moonshot era. That's a big part of why I became an engineer. I miss the days when America looked at technological challenges and only calculated how long it would take and how much it would cost, not whether we were capable or whether we should even try. Please explain to me why the engineers from the country that put men on the moon cannot invent a 100 mile to the gallon car, a rooftop solar array that is affordable, geothermal energy sources, tidal energy systems, or a fuel cell that provides all the energy your house needs without polluting at all? We used to be energized by these challenges, not politically divided over them.

I would advocated a crash program to develop fusion energy, as well as a study to look at the possibility to put a huge solar array in orbit, maybe one that also serves to shield the earth from the sun to counter CO2 induced global warming until we can get our emissions under control.

We need to look at a biologically derived chemical fuel that is equal in value to gasoline that we can produce with very little energy cost. We need to look at capturing motion and sound to generate energy. We need to extract energy from our wastes, whether it's our landfills or our wastewater treatment plants.

We need to plant more trees and manage the ones that we do have so that they don't all burn up in forest fires, contributing nothing to our well being and polluting the atmosphere in the process.

We need to control our weather. We need to learn how to divert atmospheric moisture such that no areas flood and no areas bake. This alone will expand the planet's carrying capacity by a factor of 2 or 3. The skills we learn in doing this, and in solving global warming, could someday be used to cool Venus down and warm Mars up to a habitable state. Imagine humanity with 3 habitable worlds in this solar system.

This is our future. This is not some scary scenario to be feared and resisted, this is where we are going, either voluntarily or involunarily. Why should we not accept this change, embrace it, and plunge headlong into the tasks to make it a reality?